Soderbergh Admits Che Is Complicated

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Guevara's biopic will be a war movie.

By Paul Davidson

The screenplay for Che isn't even finished yet, but director Steven Soderbergh and star Benicio del Toro are squeezing in a quick week of early filming in New York City this month. The reason? They need to get some footage in the United Nations building before upcoming renovations commence. Soderbergh explained to Coming Soon:

"We're actually shooting six days in New York this month, which we're then going to hold, and then the rest of the film will be shot next year. The sequence we're shooting now is when [Che Guevara] came to New York and spoke at the U.N. in December of '64. I guess the U.N. is going to be refurbished, and we've gotta get in there before they do."

Making a movie about Che's life has been complicated, admits Soderbergh. But after several attempts at a script, he and producer Laura Bickford are close to having something ready for production. The angle they're taking is to make Che a war movie, and concentrate on his activities in both Bolivia and Cuba.

"We're just now starting to get close, I think, to having the script the way we want. He's a very complicated subject, because he's one of the few figures that holds up the more you scrutinize him, but he was really complicated, and it's been hard to figure out what story we want to tell because there's a lot of story there. When Terry was working on the movie, it was only about Bolivia, but our movie is about Cuba and Bolivia, basically, it's a war movie."

Che should go into full production later this year. We'll be following the project closely.